Portraits from Ukraine: The Maidan Politicians

In the Maidan, Kiev’s revolutionary square, the protests are winding down and the politicians are taking over. In the uprising of the past several months, the protesters pulled off a remarkable feat of populist leverage: they forced out Viktor Yanukovych, the corrupt President, and established themselves as a political force. When ministers were chosen for the transitional government, their names were announced to the crowds in the Maidan before the parliament voted on them. Some Maidan-linked figures with no government experience drew cheers and whistles. Established politicians like Oleksandr Turchynov, the acting President, were booed loudly.

When I visited recently, though, the Maidan was filled with men and women—some in uniform, others in motley or in casual clothes—who talked loudly about revolution but seemed unsure about what to do next. Set among rows of tents and stacks of firewood were framed portraits and votive candles that honored dead protesters where they had fallen. Well-wishers made their way from one to another, and tearful friends and relatives lit candles and censers. A tent had been turned into a makeshift church, where Orthodox priests chanted prayers and burned incense; parishioners who could not fit inside stood outside under a canopy, swaying slightly, their heads tilted forward in silence. Nearby, a group of university students manned a “revolutionary post office,” and offered pen, paper, envelopes—with free postage to anywhere in the world—to anyone who wanted to send a letter. The only payment they demanded: “Do something good for someone else today.”

“When will you leave the Maidan?” I asked the students.

“Never,” a bearded young man replied, laughing. The others shrugged. It was as if they could not contemplate a life beyond the extraordinary place they occupied, in which they had helped changed their country’s history, and might yet still affect its course.

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The historian Georgiy Kasianov studies Ukrainian national identity; he is the author of a book on the Holodomor, the famine that swept Ukraine in 1932-33, when Stalin’s forced collectivization caused as many as seven million deaths. “I respect what Maidan did,” he said. “I gave money to the Maidan, I spoke in favor of them in different countries, but they played their role, and now I think they should go. I don’t like this mobocracy that gets to decree who rules.” For Kasianov, the Maidan’s “funereal quality” illustrated an essential truth about how the country saw itself. “It’s a cemetery there,” he said. “Ukrainians like this kind of thing. We have a mourning culture. To me, the Holodomor and things like it appeal to a national self-image that is pessimistic. The Russians choose to remember everything as a victory day; there is also tragedy, but it is balanced by the victory myth, whereas the Ukrainian myth is always depressive.”

The protests precipitated a national emergency, but they also overturned a pattern of defeat. In the Maidan, revolutionaries are living out a moment of freedom from tyranny and corruption. But governing involves compromise, and the Maidanites are wary of having their movement diluted. Many of them seem reassured by politicians who have sacrificed for the cause. The activist Dmytro Bulatov was kidnapped in January; his captors cut off a piece of his ear and drove nails through his hands. He is now Ukraine’s minister for youth and sport. In Kiev, young people I spoke with endorsed an aspiring local politician named Igor Lutsenko, who was also victimized for his work with the protesters. “He was an activist, a journalist,” one student told me. “He is not a politician—he is Maidan.”

One afternoon, I met Lutsenko, an athletic man in his thirties, in a belowground bar modelled on an American jazz club of the nineteen-forties. Before the protests began, he said, he had been an activist concerned with corruption and the environment—“typical themes of a post-Soviet city.” By late January, as the battles with police became more heated, Lutsenko was volunteering in the Maidan. At four o’clock one morning, doctors in the plaza’s field hospital asked him to drive a man with a wounded eye to the hospital. Soon after they arrived, a group of about ten men swarmed in from the street, grabbed them, and forced them into a minivan. They were told to keep their heads down, and were driven out of the city.

“I thought they were going to kill me,” Lutsenko told me matter-of-factly. “Since the mid-nineties, it has been the usual tactic of criminals to take people to the forests and do bad things to them. They took us into the forests and made us get down on our knees. That’s when I asked the other man his name, and I learned it was Yuri.” His last name, Lutsenko found out later, was Verbitsky. “They began beating us with sticks. They asked us basic questions like our names and what we were doing on the Maidan. They hit me about twelve times. But when he told them he was from Lviv”—a stronghold of Ukrainian nationalism—“they began to beat him much more. He was their beloved enemy. But me, when they learned I was from Kiev, they said, ‘Why are you caught up in this?’ They took me about a dozen metres away and made me lie down while they kept beating him. I lay down in the snow. From what he said, he seemed like a nice guy who had never done anything to anyone, and he didn’t understand bad people and how they think. When they beat his leg in a certain place, he asked them not to, as he had broken it there before, not realizing that it would make them beat him harder there. When you are with these kinds of sadists it’s best to hide your pain.”

After a while, the men led him and Verbitsky back into the van and drove them to a garage. There, they put a bag over Lutsenko’s head and tortured him in sessions—forty minutes of beatings with a metal pole followed by a few hours’ rest. Eventually, the men drove him back to the forest. “They offered me alcohol,” he said. “This frightened me. I thought this meant they were definitely going to kill me and make it look like I was drunk. They put me on my knees, facing a tree, and told me to pray. They untied my hands but left the bag on my head. I didn’t hear anything. Eventually, I lifted the bag and there was no one there. Little by little, I started to walk.”

Lutsenko reached a sparsely populated area on the outskirts of the city. He banged on the door of a house, and the family that lived there cautiously allowed him in. Lutsenko discovered that news broadcasts had named him as a missing person, and that he had spent more than twelve hours in custody. The next day, Verbitsky’s body was found in the woods, a plastic bag over his head. He had frozen to death.

“Many people in the West respect the police as an institution, but it’s different here,” Lutsenko said. “In Ukraine, ninety-five per cent of the criminals are police. The men who kidnapped and interrogated us were police. So the essence of the revolution is against criminals—not just against Yanukovych or oligarchs or corruption but corrupt police. They are the ones who killed Verbitsky, and who allowed Yanukovych to rule.”

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The most successful of the post-Maidan politicians is Petro Poroshenko, who recently announced his candidacy for President. Poroshenko, a billionaire candy manufacturer, is known as Ukraine’s Chocolate King; he also owns a television station, a shipyard, and several vehicle manufacturers. He was an early supporter of the Maidan protesters, and gave frequent speeches in the plaza. “After the first protester was killed, everything changed,” he told me. “No matter who we were, a billionaire, an I.T. specialist, a driver, or whatever, it didn’t matter. Ukraine was at stake.”

In the campaign, Poroshenko has often emphasized the values of the Maidan. He pointed out to me that he was the first major Maidan politician to visit Crimea after the Russian troops moved in, when he flew to Simferopol to speak with the self-proclaimed new authorities. As he made his way to the government offices, he was surrounded by hundreds of shoving, jeering ethnic Russians. After being threatened at gunpoint, Poroshenko left under police escort. When I asked him why such a wealthy man would submit himself to this treatment, Poroshenko smiled and said, “Sorry to be so pathetic, but I think Ukraine is the best country in the world.”

Of Ukraine’s seven or eight oligarchs, Poroshenko has the least money: Forbes estimates his wealth at $1.3 billion. Like most of the others, he made his initial fortune in the nineties, in the wave of privatization that followed the Soviet collapse, but he is among the least tainted by suggestions of corruption. While most of the other billionaires have preferred to influence the government from outside, Poroshenko served as national-security minister, central-bank chief, foreign minister, and minister of trade and economy. But the governments he worked for have not been uniformly successful. He was a prominent backer of the 2004 Orange Revolution, which brought Viktor Yushchenko to power; Yushchenko is his daughter’s godfather. Though the Orange Revolution began with great hopes for cleaner politics, Yushchenko’s Administration devolved into partisan squabbles, and for many Ukrainians he remains a symbol of failed reform.

As Yushchenko’s foreign minister, Poroshenko drafted an “association agreement” between Ukraine and the European Union, a potential first step toward membership. “If I do nothing else I am proud of that,” he told me. Last year, to his outrage, Yanukovych refused to sign it. “What was the purpose of that agreement? To modernize our country. We were shocked.” Poroshenko told me that when he asked why, Yanukovych sat silently, unable to explain his actions. “He was like a Muppet,” Poroshenko said.

Poroshenko’s activism has made him hugely popular among pro-Western Ukrainians; polls show that he has forty-eight per cent of the Presidential vote. At every level of government, alert politicians are trying to embody the “new style.” Pavlo Sheremeta, the recently installed minister of economy, a former business-school director, boasts of commuting to work by subway, and tweets about his jogging routes and distances. He works in the Stalinist-era Ministries building, a daunting black-and-white edifice near parliament. A trim man in his forties, he met me at his office—a cavernous room with a desk separated from the door by sixty feet of blue carpet—and told me apologetically, “It’s pretty old-school here.” He waved me to sit next to him at a conference table, and pointed to a framed picture on the wall, a poster-sized tableau of the Maidan’s hundred-odd martyrs. “That’s the only change I’ve made so far,” he said.

Sheremeta talked about the need for openness. “The last government was so anti-twenty-first century,” he said. “Nowadays you can’t hide. We might even have C.C.T.V. installed into the ministry rooms.” When I expressed skepticism, he said, “The world is open now, and we have to be open, too. I have nothing to hide. I owe nothing to any party. No industrial group is behind me. The public pays my salary. Why shouldn’t they see how we do business?”

He went on, “Russia made a mistake supporting a relationship with a leadership that was inefficient, to say the least, as well as corrupt—and which also killed people on the Maidan. What was done in the last three months has left quite deep scars here.” Sheremeta was that most unusual thing: a Ukrainian optimist. When I asked how he managed to function as the minister of economy in a country that was essentially bankrupt, he said brightly, “Look, the timing is always wrong in life. My grandmother is ninety. She saw the hunger famine, the Second World War, the purges after the war. In other words, we have nothing to complain about.”